"You often hear about how important it is to write 'readable code'. Developers have pretty strong opinions about what makes code more readable. The more senior the developer, the stronger the opinion. But, have you ever stopped to think about what really makes code readable?"

"The rules for 50,000,000 lines of code are different from 140,000 or 10,000 or 1,000.

Err no they aren't. "

Indeed. The only actual difference is the degree to which you can get away with ignorance or indifference towards such rules. When complexity increases quadratically to line count, cowboy hackery that works great at a couple dozen lines and is just about still tolerable at a few hundred will eventually exceed even the most brilliantly photographic and pathologically OCD mind if it continues to scale that way. Really, if you go over a hundred lines and don't already own a copy of Code Complete and a link to thedailywtf.com then you really should stop there awhile to take stock of your position if you've any sense at all.

In my own comical case, I got to 2500 lines of Grande Spaghetti before I crashed and burned most horribly. Call me a total lightweight (2500? Pfft!), but at least it taught me my most valuable lesson early rather than later in my programming life (i.e. well before anything remotely business-critical), and resolved me to learn how to construct software properly in future. Whereas if The Daily WTF is anything to go by, there's a frighteningly significant chunk of professional practitioners who go magnitudes bigger than that and still never learn anything no matter how disastrously it all ultimately collapses around and on top of them.